(NaturalNews) When British television channel ITV was recently caught trying to peddle fake video game footage as if it was actual footage of Irish Republican Army (IRA) fighters shooting down a British helicopter, the network claimed it was an "accident." But to the rest of the world, the stunt represents either a complete lack of competence, or a poorly-wrought indictment of the mainstream media's obvious use of propaganda to promote an agenda.

ABC News in Australia reports that ITV has apologized for using footage from the video simulation game Arma II in a recent documentary about Col. Muammar Gaddafi, the now-deposed former ruler of Libya, and his alleged connection with IRA forces. But this does not explain how the network managed to "accidentally" put the fake footage in place of real footage, which it claims actually exists.

An ITV spokesman told ABC News that the fake footage was "mistakenly included" instead of the real footage, which had allegedly been captured in 1988 when the incident occurred and used in a previous documentary. The spokesman went on to claim that the whole thing was an "unfortunate case of human error."

But not everyone is buying this explanation. The creators of the Arma II video game, for instance, do not understand how the footage could have been accidentally swapped. And further, what was the fake footage intended to be used for, if not for the potential purpose of providing video "evidence" of another supposed event that did not necessarily occur.

"I am not sure how they could make such [an] obvious mistake," Marek Spanel, CEO of Bohemia Interactive Studio, creator of Arma II, is quoted as saying by ABC News. "On a somewhat more positive note, we consider this as a bizarre appreciation of the level of realism incorporated into our games."

Back in May, we shared with you a humorous CNN news broadcast that was aired back in the '90s. In the clip, which is available at NaturalNews.TV, reporter Charles Jaco is seen standing in an obviously-fake set designed to look like Saudi Arabia and pretending to cover Operation Desert Storm:http://www.naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=B55147E205...

Was the ITV footage mixup a similar, but more technologically-advanced, attempt at faking a news report? Maybe it was an accident, and the fake clip was meant for use as part of another report? In either case, the fact that ITV had the clip in its archives at all is suspicious enough to warrant further scrutiny of its, and the rest of the media's, coverage of war-related and other controversial events.